Tag Archives: consumerism

For all of the subtle grace that distinguishes Japanese civilization, the esoteric gabble of Western diplomacy seems to elude its leaders. Every few months, some titan of Tokyo pronounces his low opinion of America and Americans, unveiling his view that our schools are dreadful, our racial minorities backward, our politicians crooks, or our workers lazy. Read more …

My Little Pony: The Movie has surely been a test and a crisis for the franchise and its creators. Has it succumbed to the enormous pressure to cuck out, and dilute its themes and formula with “poz”? Or have the show and the Mane Six retained their integrity through the quantum leap to the big screen?

Thankfully, there is little here to complain about. Unlike previous spin-offs of the Equestria Girls movies set in the relative narrative isolation of an American high school, My Little Pony: The Movie is set in Equestria with a capital E, Read more …

Werner Sombart is an author who deserves to be studied more than he currently is. Sombart furnishes an example of a serious method for studying socio-economic phenomena, one that is far removed from the deformations and biases of materialist sociology (especially of the Marxist type). For Sombart, even economic life is composed of a body and a soul. Read more …

They say that in a non-European country, but with an old civilization, an American company, lamenting the lack of assiduousness of the local work force, thought it had come up with an effective incentive: doubling the workers’ hourly wages. Read more …

The following essay on Jewish materialism is excerpted from When Victims Rule, chapter 5, “Yicchus (Status),” formerly on the Jewish Tribal Review website. I have removed the in-text citations for easier reading and added the title.

Jewish pride and concern for status and material affluence has a long history. There is a Yiddish word for it: yicchus, Read more …

This is the text of a talk that I gave on August 15, 1996 to an adult education class that I used to run in Atlanta, way back when I was in graduate school. I recall that the actual lecture was much longer and involved discussions of Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. If a tape comes to light, I will dub it and make it available.

Man: Would you consider sleeping with me for a million dollars?Woman: Well . . . I guess so.Man: How about ten dollars?Woman [angrily]: Do you think I’m a whore?Man: Yes, we’re just haggling over the price.

This came to my mind when I saw coverage and comment on the usual Black Friday frenzy, Read more …

Now not all the waves
of the four seas are calm,
but in the land of Yamato,
where the sun rises,
the winds are sated, men devote themselves to pleasure.
Under the virtuous rule of His Majesty
peace reigns everywhere.Read more …

In an earlier essay, I shared ten aphorisms from “my code.” In case you missed that essay, I will just say that a few years ago I decided to establish a code to live by. Like most of the things I do, this turned into a major project and I wound up gathering nuggets of “practical knowledge” from all manner of sources: Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, the Eddas and Sagas, medieval Chivalry, Japanese Bushido, Tyler Durden, G. I. Gurdjieff, and even Indian Shaivism. Read more …

In the last few decades, white flight from the cities has been reversed. With homosexuals serving as the shock troops, wealthy white liberals are gentrifying neighborhoods and cities, and remaking them in their own image. Such communities have certain symbols and institutions to let you know that you are in conquered territory where the “SWPL” (Stuff White People Like) rules. These include expensive cupcake boutiques, COEXIST and Human Rights Campaign bumper stickers, and a Starbucks on every block. Read more …

When a people loses a sense of blood-relatedness, what basis is there for community? American community is not based on blood ties, shared history, shared religion, or shared culture: it is based on ideology. He who professes the American creed is an American—he who does not is an outcast.

When I was asked to review this book, I half groaned because I was sure of what to expect and I also knew it was not going to broaden my knowledge in a significant way. From my earlier reading up on other, but tangentially related subject areas (e.g., advertising), I already knew, and it seemed more than obvious to me, that consumer behavior had an evolutionary basis. Read more …